Pressing and holding S (Select tool) now switches to Select while you hold the key down, and goes back to the previous tool when you release the key. Tapping S will still switch you to the Select tool.

Ladder controls on handles are now semi-transparent to make it easier to see the effect of changes.

Improved

Dedicated game development tools shelf (ongoing).

Changed

The view tool defaults are now to automatically set the tumble pivot on geometry under the mouse pointer when you start tumbling, and to dolly toward/away from the mouse pointer. You can change the behavior using controls in the View tool’s operation toolbar or in the main preferences.

3D viewport

New

Fast, distance-adaptive instancing of packed primitives and Alembics in the 3D view. For example, the viewport can stream in geometry for close objects and replace far objects with bounding boxes. Distance culling controls are on the Optimize tab of the Display Options window.

Improved

Metallic map support at normal quality level.

Improved

"Cutout" transparency quality setting hides anything with Alpha equal to 0, and shows everything else fully opaque. This is much faster because it doesn’t require blending or extra display passes.

Improved

Basic support for displaying OpenSubdiv 3.x surfaces.

Improved

New option in display options sets an upper limit on the number of polygons produced by viewport subdivision (default is 10 million). If the viewport goes over the limit, it will iteratively restart at a lower subdivision level until it is under budget (this may result in no viewport subdivision at all).

New

Lights and Cameras ▸ Gamepad camera shelf tool creates a Gamepad CHOP setup to drive a camera. This is useful for flying through a scene, and as an example of using the Gamepad CHOP.

Improved

The 3D view now supports instancing on points with an instancefile attribute (when the object has instancing turned on). Previously this only worked at render time.

Fixed

Better near/far clipping settings when you switch from looking through a camera to the "unlocked" view.

Fixed

You can now click buttons in the toolbars around the viewport while holding Space to enter the view tool.

Changed

The hotkeys to turn subdivision on an object on or off (- and =) now require Shift (⇧ Shift + - and ⇧ Shift + =) to prevent accidental activation.

Changed

Houdini no longer draws a green tip on selected edges to indicate direction.

On the FLIP solver node's Volume motion ▸ Air tab, turn on Enforce air incompressibility.

Works well with viscous fluids.

OpenCL accelerated.

Hair and fur

New

You can now partition a model into different areas with local grooms and then blend between them with the Groom Merge object. The Guide Groom tool now supports selecting an entire object or groups of polygons. For more information, see Fur Workflow.

Productivity and performance improvements.
You can now input skin objects to Guide Groom and Guide Deform to set up source relationships.
The Animate and Simulate now support selecting multiple objects.

The Hair Generate object now has an option to generate hair once in the rest position and deforming afterwards, using the updated Guide Deform.

Geometry and modeling

New

Completely rewritten Poly Reduce node does much better reduction much faster while retaining features and preserving quads.

98% polygon reduction while retaining textures and features

New

The abcpointcount intrinsic attribute on packed Alembic primitives contains the number of points in the unpacked geometry.

New

Edge Transport is a highly technical SOP for generating attributes by "walking" along the edge graph formed by the input geometry.

Improved

Enhanced Topo Build interactive mode allows sliding edges, skinning polygonal "sleeves" around roughly cylindrical features such as a tail, and more accurate snapping. Topobuild can also now collapse edges and faces.

The Invoke SOP lets you "apply" a compiled SOP block to an arbitrary input. This can be used to reduce duplication in a network, or to allow an asset to accept a reference to a block as a parameter and use the block to modify how the asset works.

You can now set the HOUDINI_SOP_DISABLE_COMPILENODE environment variable to make compiled blocks run in non-compiled mode. This may be useful for testing.

Improvements to Alembic IO. Ogawa files now load in parallel. Animated Alembics can play back much faster. Caching allows multiple SOPs to reference the same Alembic with less cost.

Improved

A display option in the 3D viewer lets you color 3D boundaries (unshared edges) or UV boundaries differently to make them easier to see (pop-up menu on the Markers tab under "Draw"). A new option "UV boundaries in UV only" lets you color UV boundaries only in a UV viewport (not in 3D).

Improved

Objects and geometry nodes now have a separate Pivot Rotate parameter to rotate the geometry’s local axes. Previously, it was only possible to translate the local axes. Rotating the local frame of reference can make it easier to animate along non-axis-aligned directions.

The interactive pivot handle now allows rotation as well as translation. (Press Ins or ' to switch to the pivot handle.)

Most UV-related SOPs have been updated with a parameter to let you choose which UV attribute to operate on.

When you work interactively in the viewport, UV operations automatically use the UV attribute of the previous node.

New

You can now choose the UV viewport background image from a list of associated textures/materials in the UV menu.

The background image now works with UDIM and UVtile maps.

Improved

Better UV generation on Poly Extrude and Poly Bridge nodes. You can now automatically generate linear texture maps for bridges and extruded side polygons for every existing texture attribute, with control over island scale and shape.

Improved

You can now select points when displaying vertex UVs in the UV viewport.

Improved

The UV viewport only shows the current/selected object when you are at the object level.

Improved

UV Layout node now has very fast optimal packing with support for packing inside holes and rotational fitting.

Improved

The file browser’s Show sequences as one entry option now works with UDIM and UVTile filenames.

Improved

The color visualizer can now visualize "texture distortion" directly. This visualizer is now available in the UV viewport’s UV menu.

Previously the visualizer relied on the UV Flatten SOP generating a distort attribute. That attribute is no longer generated.

Changed

With the new built-in support for multiple texture attributes, the Layer SOP is now deprecated. If you were using it to swap other attributes, use Attribute Swap instead.

New "Motors" settings on the Crowd State node let a ragdoll character still put a certain amount of effort into moving its joints according to an animation clip.

Improved

You can now set agents to partially rag-doll on the Crowd State node. You can set a named set of joints to rag-doll, and/or you can specify that joints try to follow their animation clip but also react to RBD collisions.

Improved

New stiffness settings on Crowd State node prevent loosely swinging limbs on ragdolls.

Agent Arcing Clip Layer DOP blends between a set of clips based on the agent’s turn rate and direction, for smarter quadruped terrain adaptation and banking.

Improved

The Agent Clip Transition Graph SOP has new options to automatically compute transition points between clips, making it much less work to set up smooth transitions between clips.

Improved

You can now use Agent Edit SOP interactively in the 3D view. Agent Edit can now adjust transforms in the agent’s local space instead of world space. You can now adjust a joint’s scale transform. Agent Edit can now use VEXpressions to vary the transform parameters for each agent.

Improved

There is now an option on the Agent Layer SOP to filter which shape bindings to copy.

Agent Terrain Adaptation SOP now has an option to disable adaptations that use an underling DOP simulation (such as foot locking and leaning). When this option is off, the node switches to a stateless implementation that allows fast preview and scrubbing.

Fixed

If an agent "transitions" to the same clip (without a transition graph), the clip will now continue instead of resetting to the first frame.

You can now choose whether FBX export creates an extra root for the Export node’s subnetwork.

Network editor

New

You can now save you node type color and shape assignments as a theme, and switch between themes.

New

New node badges: "bone object has kinematics", "node has take data", and "node needs to cook".

New

New badge options.
The comment and descriptive parameter are now treated as text badges.
Text badges have more options such as to show full text for the selected nodes, but abbreviated text for unselected nodes.

Improved

Smarter multi-wiring.
During a wiring operation, you can Shift-click other inputs/outputs to add them to the operation.
If you are wiring multiple inputs and Alt-click in space Houdini will create a dot.
If you are wiring multiple outputs and Alt-click in space, Houdini will create a Merge node and continue wiring the merged output.

Improved

Hold ⌃ Ctrl when minimizing/restoring a network box to move other nodes around the netbox to account for its new size.

Improved

When a node inside a minimized netbox is selected, the netbox is highlighted and the name of the node is drawn next to it.

Improved

Many improvements to the Find dialog.
Improved performance.
Pin the dialog to have multiple Find dialogs open.
Optional recursive search of child nodes.
You can now search by the raw textual contents of parameters (for example, you can search for uses of specific variables or expression functions).

Improved

Nodes with required inputs now have a red triangle drawn above the input as a visual hint.

Improved

You can now hold S to enter a "select-only" mode. While you hold the key down, clicking and dragging will only select. This makes it easy to select nodes without worrying about moving the node or accidentally clicking wires, flags, or other UI.

Improved

You can now ⌃ Ctrl + ⇧ Shift + click nodes to toggle selected/unselected, as you can with items in the 3D view.

Improved

The network editor toolbar now has a button to show or hide the node palette.

The labels in the top left and right corners of the network editor are now generated by a replaceable script (PATH/python2.7libs/nodegraphtitle.py)

Improved

The network editor will now look for PATH/python2.7libs/nodegraphhooks.py and import it. This provides a standard place for expert users to hook into network editor events. See extending the network editor for more information.

Dynamics and effects

New Constrain Region tool on the Solid shelf welds two solid (FEM) objects together where they overlap. This lets you union two shapes, or pull one solid by manipulating another solid constrained to it.

New

New Visualize Finite Element tool on the Solid shelf colors tets to visualize properties such as energy level or tetrahedron quality. It can also hide part of a solid object to allow you to see the tets inside.

The Use parallel constraint solver is replaced with a menu to choose the new replacement solver or the old default solver. The old solver works well in specific situations (for example ragdolls that aren’t piled on each other) but ends up being essentially single-threaded in most scenarios like a building collapse.

Improved

You can now attach constraint network geometry as subdata instead of as a relationship.

Improved

Added a Solver Tolerance parameter to the Bullet solver to let the solver stop early if it is "close enough". The Bullet solver now always outputs force, torque, distance, and angle attributes.

For constraint networks, the Bullet solver now skips constraints where the name point attribute is non-empty and does not specify a valid object.
To constrain an object to a world space position, use an empty string (@name="").

New Manhattan and Chebyshev noise distance metrics generate different looks.

Improved

Houdini now loads VEX plugins from directories in the new $HOUDINI_VEX_DSO_PATH environment variable, if it exists. You no longer need to list VEX plugins in a separate index file.

Changed

Limit surface evaluation in VEX will give slightly different values. OpenSubdiv 3.0 did not support limit surface evaluation of Houdini vertex attributes.

Houdini will linearly interpolate vertex attributes across the ptex patch until we correct interpolation with the new OpenSubdiv 3.1 version. This may be addressed in a future nightly or production build.

New hou.Parm.rawValue() method lets you get the actual textual content of a parameter, without evaluation or variable substitution.

Improved

XML menus are now more capable. You can generate an item’s label and control whether it’s disabled with Python snippets.

Improved

You can now use sesictrl to redeem entitlements on the command line without any interactive prompts. Specify your login information using the -A flag and the entitlements as extra arguments to -L. For example:

If a parameter menu contains only integers, you can now turn on an option to use the integer values as the menu item tokens instead of the indices.

Improved

You can now create string array attributes with a tuple size greater than 1.
String attributes no longer distinguish between null and empty string. There is only empty string, which has string index -1.